Reading Poems Backward

It probably happens now and then, though perhaps you don’t give it much thought. You read a poem backward.

You pick up a poetry anthology, or you come upon a poem in a magazine, and your eye chances to fall upon its last lines. You read those. Then you read the poem.

You read the poem, that is, knowing exactly where it’s headed. Sometimes this may occur with short stories (you read the last lines of the story first), but far less often. And as for novels—surely most of us carefully avoid the final page; given the time we’ll be investing, we’re reluctant to spoil the book’s surprise.

Reading a poem backward is a distinctive experience, during which you’re typically asking not Where is this going?, but Can the poet justify the finish? In other words, Will the conclusion feel deserved?

Say you read Keats’s sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be” backward. You begin with its close:

Then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

You then proceed to the start, aware that the poem is going to entail a throwing off of earthly cares and concerns. In the domain of poetry, abnegations of this type usually represent a triumph (the eternal spirit overcoming the fleeting temptations of the body, and so forth)—but not here. We’re marching toward a state of unremitting desolation: the world will drop away, with no compensating replacement. And as you progress in that direction, you’re wondering the whole time if Keats’s conclusive despair will feel authentic—if it will engender a heart-sore pang—or seem callow and easy. And whether or not you ultimately decide that the poem achieves its nothingness, so to speak, is probably a good indicator of how much or little you like Keats.

The other day, I took down from a friend’s bookshelf Conrad Aiken’s anthology “Modern American Poets” (1927). I opened to the table of contents. Aiken’s selections afforded me that old but ever-welcome sensation of superiority of taste that typically comes of looking at any outmoded anthology. How shortsighted people used to be! (How much more discerning we surely are…) No Marianne Moore? No John Crowe Ransom? No E. E. Cummings? And yet page after page of Alfred Kreymborg (who?) and Anna Hempstead Branch (who?) and Maxwell Bodenheim (who?). I looked into Kreymborg (familiar to me chiefly as an early champion of Moore) and happened to read a poem of his, “Vista”, backward.

I fell upon its amenable concluding couplet: “Ah, yes; ah, yes; ah, yes, indeed, / Verily yes, ah yes, indeed!” It seemed highly unlikely, and yet beguilingly conceivable, that the poem’s preceding lines could justify such an effusion. Clearly, those lines would need to contain something deeply revelatory or monumentally uneasy-making to validate an ending so glib and empty-sounding.

Well, as expected, the poem (a little thirteen-liner whose contemplation drifted from snow to sea to love) failed to meet the challenge its own last lines presented. Even so, I liked “Vista” better than expected, and I read systematically through the thirty-plus pages of Kreymborg selections, always beginning with the poem’s conclusion. And I found, each time, that he couldn’t quite get to the end he’d set for himself.

I began mentally cataloguing some celebrated modern American poems whose last lines make outsize claims, effectively declaring that the poem has completed some sort of considerable journey: “And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, / Went home and put a bullet through his head” (Edwin Arlington Robinson); “Beauty is everlasting / and dust is for a time” (Marianne Moore); “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream” (Wallace Stevens); “And one is One, free in the tearing wind” (Theodore Roethke); “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” (Robert Hayden); “Not with a man’s wish: ‘May this day be different,’ / But with the birds’ wish: ‘May this day / Be the same day, the day of my life’” (Randall Jarrell); “The Lord survives the rainbow of His will” (Robert Lowell); “in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night” (Allen Ginsberg); “And I eat men like air” (Sylvia Plath). By my lights, five of these nine poems actually earn their last lines, but other readers surely would come up with different tallies.

Warming to the question of what it means to read a poem backward, I drifted through Aiken’s anthology and finally stopped on the narrow banks of Robert Frost’s “Hyla Brook.” I began with its celebrated ending: “We love the things we love for what they are.” I’ve always admired the poem, which I think of as one of his lovelier sonnets—after Shakespeare and Hopkins, Frost is my favorite sonneteer—though it runs a line longer than a sonnet strictly should. But does the poem earn its last line?

The concluding ten monosyllables are in many ways quintessential Frost. They create one of those rough-hewn homilies (like “Good fences make good neighbors” or “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches” or “Nothing gold can stay”) which some fairspoken New England villager, in a universe only slightly better than our own, might actually utter. The line is Frostian too in having drawn a moral from a closely observed natural tableau. A reflexive transcendentalist, Frost was a hiker who tramped the woods forever looking for lessons. Here’s the poem in entirety:

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed. Sought for much after that, it will be found Either to have gone groping underground (And taken with it all the Hyla breed That shouted in the mist a month ago, Like ghost of sleigh bells in a ghost of snow)— Or flourished and come up in jewelweed, Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent, Even against the way its waters went. Its bed is left a faded paper sheet Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat— A brook to none but who remember long. This as it will be seen is other far Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song. We love the things we love for what they are.

Those tree-frogs that gives the brook its name are doubly dead. A month ago, even at their summit of life, they were spectral—emissaries of a cold, vanished season—and now they’ve disappeared altogether. Or, if they have been transformed into jewelweed, they’ve lost that essence of all flowing water which unites the Amazon with a trifling spring freshet: a sense of oceanic propulsion. They are directionless. The brook has become something that sounds awfully like a failed poem (“a faded paper sheet”), save that those “who remember long”—Mr. Frost, preëminently—recall its former quickness and quiddity.

Of course there’s a touch of self-congratulation to the phrase “otherwhere in song.” Frost is letting us know that while his brother poets may feel compelled to commemorate more notable waterways (“Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song,” “I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it”), he has chosen to extol a brook that is no body of water at all, save to those of durable memory or buoyant imagination.

Does he fully deserve his last line: “We love the things we love for what they are”? Suddenly, having this time read the poem backward, its full beauty broke over my head. The poem is not necessarily about a brook—lovingly evoked though its brook-ness is. It could just as well be the one-eyed cat we adopt because no one else will take it in. Or the incompetent oil painting we embrace because a great-uncle painted it. (See Elizabeth Bishop’s “Large Bad Picture.”) Or your dead grandfather’s sweater, which you hold onto even though it is: 1) ugly, 2) unfashionable, 3) pilled and worn, 4) ill-fitting.

There’s an irony in reading Frost backward, given how strongly he recoiled at working backward. He once noted, “I never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.“ He viewed the issue in characteristically ethical terms. To write a poem whose ending you were already aware of seemed to him a form of cheating.

I’ve never been able to share Frost’s views on this. If a poet determines that a poem should begin at point A and conclude at point D, say, the mystery of how to get there—how to pass felicitously through points B and C—strikes me as an artistic task both genuine and enlivening. There are fertile mysteries of transition, no less than of termination.

And I’d like to suppose that Frost himself would recognize that any ingress into a poem is better than being locked out entirely. His little two-liner, “The Secret,” suggests as much: “We dance round in a ring and suppose / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.” Most truly good poems might be said to contain a secret: the little sacramental miracle by which you connect, intimately, with the words of a total stranger. And whether you come at the poem frontward, or backward, or inside out—whether you approach it deliberately, word by word and line by line, or you parachute into it borne on a sudden breeze from the island of Serendip—surely isn’t the important thing. What matters is whether you achieve entrance into its inner ring, and there repose companionably beside the Secret.

Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His collection of new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” was published earlier this year. He is a frequent contributor to Page-Turner.

Photograph of Robert Frost by Marvin Koner/Corbis.

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